The Walking Dead's Glen Mazzara To Script The Shining Prequel

Glen Mazzara has spent the last couple years embedded in the world of zombies, until recently serving as the showrunner on the hit AMC television series The Walking Dead, but now he's getting ready to move over to a completely different horror subgenre: haunted hotels.

Deadline has learned that Mazzara has signed a deal to script The Overlook Hotel, a prequel to Stanley Kubrick's classic The Shining, which was in turn based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. We first learned about the project last July, and it's set up over at Warner Bros., though we still have no idea how or when the story will be structured or set. Laeta Kalogridis (who wrote Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island), James Vanderbilt (who scripted Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man) and Bradley Fischer (who produced Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan and David Fincher's Zodiac), will be serving as producers on the film.

While King never wrote a prequel to The Shining, he actually did recently write a sequel called Doctor Sleep, which will be in stores later this year. The story follows an adult Danny Torrance as he (according to the Amazon description) tries to save a twelve-year-old girl "from a tribe of murderous paranormals."

It's a balsy move for Mazzara to take this project on, but here's an important question: what filmmaker in their right mind is going to take this on? Kubrick's film is one of the most impeccably crafted horror films of all time, and there's no question that every shot of this new project will be compared to The Shining. What kind of person would want to subject themselves to that kind of impossible pressure? I can see it being a long, hard search to find someone with the testicular fortitude to do it.